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“ Experts often possess more data than judgment. ” - Colin Powell ....hmmm, those experts surely are not using a scalable Business Intelligence solution to optimize that data which can help them make better decisions. :-) Data is everywhere! The amount of data being collected by organizations today is experiencing explosive growth. In general, ETL (Extract Transform Load) tools have been designed to move, cleanse, integrate, normalize and enrich raw data to make it meaningful and available for knowledge workers and decision support systems. Once data has been "optimized," only then can it be turned into "actionable" information using the appropriate business applications or Business Intelligence software. This information could then be used to discover how to increase profits, reduce costs or even write a program that suggests what your next movie on Netflix should be. The capability to pre-process this raw-data before making it available to the masses, becomes increasingly vital to organizations who must collect, merge and create a centralized repository containing "one version of the truth." Having an ETL solution that is always available, extensible and highly scalable is an integral part of processing this data. Pentaho...

Several of our executives at Pentaho have shared reasons why they joined Pentaho - you can read their blogs here , here and here . We surveyed employees at Pentaho and narrowed down the top 5 reasons to join the Pentaho team : The fridge is stocked with beer . Corona, Amstel, Sierra Nevada, we have it all! Changing the face of business intelligence is no easy feat. To help us out, the Pentaho offices have dedicated full-sized beer refrigerators, so we can enjoy our favorite cold ones at the end of the day. Be a part of revolutionizing the business intelligence industry . Pentaho was founded in 2004 with the mission to “To achieve positive, disruptive change in the BI space by building an innovative, class-leading BI platform and making it available to everyone by releasing it into Open Source”. We are working towards this mission everyday and succeeding! Smart, motivated, and fun co-workers . We may work hard, but we know how to have a good time! From sales meeting to Halloween , we’re always in the company of innovative, intelligent, and friendly people. International opportunities . Being...

Can Business and IT finally live in harmony when it comes to BI? This is not a new concept or question. In fact, for the last several years pretty much all BI vendors claimed that they have solved the “Business and IT Collaboration” needs. Or, at least their marketing departments did! To truly solve a problem, we must first fully understand it. In this case it is important to ask questions such as: Why is there a lack of collaboration between these two groups? What is so drastically different about these two groups that have forced such a gap between them? The truth is that IT needs a central ownership to information to streamline processes and ensure sustainability, while business users want their own self-service and ownership to gain results faster. After all business users have become a lot more analysis and data savvy these days as compared to the past; so, an old-school approach of letting IT do the work and just being the consumers of canned reports doesn’t cut it anymore. Perhaps this picture illustrates the differences more clearly. As you can see, these two groups are clearly...

It's release time once again and I’m pleased to announce that Pentaho BI Suite 3.8 is available for download! This release is packed with new features empowering you to add more interactivity to your Pentaho-based solutions and improve performance and efficiency when working with larger and larger data volumes. In today’s blog, I’ll highlight just a few of these exciting new enhancements: Guided Analysis Building upon the hyperlink feature introduced in Pentaho Reporting with our 3.7 BI suite release, Analyzer Reports and Action Sequences now also provide the ability to create contextual hyperlinks to other pieces of Pentaho content or external URLs. You now have complete flexibility to provide information consumers with guided paths to additional detail or related content found in another report. For example, with a couple of clicks you could create a summary level Analyzer Report for users to explore and analyze product sales, then enable hyperlinks on product names which link out to a detailed inventory report to ensure there are enough units on hand for your top selling products. Dashboard Content Linking Pentaho Dashboard Designer also receives a dose of interactivity with a feature we...

We are trotting the globe to bring Agile Business Intelligence to a city near you. The latest Pentaho seminar series, Fast Track BI , spans over 40 cities around the world, bringing half-day complimentary training sessions to companies looking to implement BI. With Pentaho's unique Agile BI approach, speed of thought reporting and analysis, and out-of-the-box data integration capabilities, you'll learn how to put your business intelligence projects on the fast track to success. 5. It's free! Each half-day seminar is packed with information, training, and business intelligence best practices. Who doesn't enjoy free education these days? 4. See real-life use cases and live demonstrations of the Pentaho Agile BI approach in action. 3. Network with other CTOs, CIOs, Architects, and IT executives in your area to share best practices in implementing business intelligence. 2. Meet the dedicated Pentaho partner in your area to start the conversation on how your company can start leveraging open source business intelligence. 1. Of the Top 5 Open Source Companies , 3 are in the business intelligence space. Now is the time to get familiar with the next generation of business intelligence. See the...

Q&A is a series on the Business Intelligence from the Swamp Blog that interviews key members of the Pentaho team to learn more about their focus at Pentaho and outlook on the Business Intelligence industry. If you have attended a Pentaho training class, most likely you have had a chance to meet the knowledgeable and entertaining Lynn Yarbrough. To get to know Lynn and our training classes better we asked Lynn 5 questions. 1. What brought you to Pentaho and what do you do? I am a trainer at Pentaho. After almost 20 years in the BI and Data Integration industry working at companies like Information Builders and Hyperion, I wanted to work at a smaller Business Intelligence company and I found a job posting for a training position at Pentaho on Monster. 2. How many classes have you taught and do you have a favorite that stands out? I have been with Pentaho almost 4 years and probably taught 40 classes last year alone. My favorite class is the Pentaho BI Suite BootCamp . I especially love the morning of Day 3, because that when we complete the creation...

For the shortest month of the year, Pentaho made a lot of noise in the press. Not as much as Charlie Sheen, Egypt and Libya, but we had our fare share as you can see below in our February in review update. New customer references This month we were happy to add Brussels Airport to our list of customer successes . Following a competitive proof-of-concept project to replace both its Oracle reporting and an IBM Extraction Transformation and Load tool, Brussels Airport selected Pentaho for its reporting and ETL capabilities to achieve their goal of a single Information Delivery Platform. You can read their story in English , French and Dutch . "Choosing Pentaho meant we could replace not just our reporting, but also our proprietary ETL tool to achieve our goal of a single Information Delivery Platform. Given we found Pentaho gives us at least 80 to 85% of the functionality of proprietary vendors, the cost savings we achieved are hugely significant at an estimated €350K+." Pentaho in the news Interview: Karl de Bruijn, European IT director, Specsavers Computing.co.uk, Nicolla Brittian The Microsoft Cloud BI Story, Dateline February 2011...